Thirty years in television production. Living in a midwestern city in the productive custody of his wife and four children (Baby Girl, Marine, Future Tony Winner & Xerox).
Unrelenting, unrepentant conservative. Needs a better temperament that equals his photoshop skills.
Will probably die broke but believes more in freedom than the welfare state.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen in a police van, after he was arrested by British police, in London, Britain April 11, 2019. REUTERS/Henry NichollsWikileaks founder Julian Assange has been indicted on 17 counts of violating the US Espionage Act, the same act his co-conspirator, Bradley “Call me Chelsea” Manning was convicted of breaking. But in the history of the Act, no third party has ever been successfully tried and convicted. The 52 were either anarchists directly plotting to overthrow the US government or persons who sold or made available American secrets to hostile powers.

Progressives cheered Assange’s arrest in April because they believe him to be an agent of Donald Trump’s, the man who helped disseminate the Hillary Clinton/DNC emails that the mainstream press worked so hard to gloss over. Mrs. Clinton herself chimed in, “The bottom line is he has to answer for what he has done, at least as it’s been charged.” Their mantra has been “Julian Assange is no journalist!” so he is undeserving of First Amendment protection. This is actually been a point of agreement among Progressives and Conservatives. Both National Review and Commentary ran editorials to this effect.

James Pethokoukis is a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute. (Previously, he was Washington columnist for Reuters Breakingviews, the opinion and commentary wing of Thomson Reuters.) In addition, he is an official CNBC contributor.
Pethokoukis has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, National Review, The Washington Examiner, and The Daily.
Pethokoukis has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, Fox News Channel, Fo… [more]

It’s hard to be a big tech company these days without somebody rooting for your demise. But some cases are a bit more understandable than others. Like this one: “Bannon says killing Huawei more important than trade deal with China.” I mean, I get it. Former Trump White House adviser and nationalist Steve Bannon wants America to launch and win a Tech Cold War against China. Taking an ax to what might be its most important tech company, a key player in the global 5G rollout, might be a big step forward in such a plan.

But it’s not Americans wanting to shut down just Chinese tech companies. Sometimes it’s Americans going after American firms. “Maybe we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared,” writes Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, in an op-ed for USA Today. And his problem isn’t just with the social media giant run by Mark Zuckerberg. According to Hawley, Twitter and Instagram, though oddly not YouTube, are also “best understood as a parasite on productive investment, on meaningful relationships, on a healthy society,” He claims they’ve created an “addiction economy” based on extracting and selling data gleaned from uninformed users. The first sentence of the piece: “Social media consumers are getting wise to the joke that when the product is free, they’re the ones being sold.”

Bethany Mandel is a part-time editor at Ricochet and columnist at the Jewish Daily Forward. She is a stay-at-home mother of three kids, four years old and younger. She also is a co-host of That Sethany Show and LadyBrains Podcast.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson isn’t having a good week if you’re reading news coverage in the progressive and mainstream press. First, this reporting from The Root,

During a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Tuesday morning, Carson was asked by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), about disparities in REO rates. According to USA Today, “an REO, or ‘real estate owned,’ refers to a kind of property owned by a lender, like a bank, after a foreclosure.”

James Pethokoukis is a columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute. (Previously, he was Washington columnist for Reuters Breakingviews, the opinion and commentary wing of Thomson Reuters.) In addition, he is an official CNBC contributor.
Pethokoukis has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, National Review, The Washington Examiner, and The Daily.
Pethokoukis has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, Fox News Channel, Fo… [more]

Let’s assume the Trump White House blacklisting of Huawei in effect marks the beginning of a full-fledged Tech Cold War between America and China, complete with a Digital Iron Curtain. The full metaphor. How then does the conflict end in an American victory? And what does that even look like? Have the tech cold warriors, both within the White House and externally, given serious thought to any of this?

We know how the more comprehensive Cold War 1.0 concluded, with the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1991. It was a collapse that some predicted was inevitable. But at the time many others thought the scenario so unlikely as to be unworthy of speculation. The whole idea of 1970s detente was based on the perceived durability of the USSR. And this view held nearly to the very end. For example: The 1984 film “2010: The Year We Make Contact” was a sequel to the 1968 Stanley Kubrick-directed film “2001: A Space Odyssey” and concerns a joint US-USSR deep space mission.

Hello. My Ricochet name, sawatdeeka, is a Thai greeting that women use. Men would say, "sawatdeekap." So, sawatdeeka. Here are some bio basics:
-I've been a wife for half my life, and we're parents of two teenage daughters.
-I work in education, mainly from home doing mostly curriculum and instruction for a small Christian school in California (title: accreditation coordinator).
-I taught humanities to junior high and some high school from about '97 to '99, before I had my daughters.
… [more]

Bob Spwortz: And I’m your host, Bob Spwortz. Along with Kurt Kurtsson at the tracking board, we’ll be following this exciting competition to the very end. Beginning with the second division, we had exciting news this week as Mayor Bill De Blasio decided to enter the race.

Like much of America, I hate-watched the end of Game of Thrones. Ultimately, the ending was unsatisfying, but there have been worse disappointments in the world of television. I come not to bury or to praise Game of Thrones, but to instead highlight a good statement from about the middle of an episode (albeit, not advice the show actually followed):

“What unites a people? Armies? Gold? Flags? Stories. There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story.”